Another interesting post on the Psychology Today blogs, this one by Jesse Prinz.

Atheism is said to pose a major threat to morality. Some theists claim that disbelief leads to moral relativism and undermines a major factor motivating prosocial behavior. Recent research can help us see what is true and false about these anxieties.

These issues have special resonance in the United States. A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reveals that 92% of Americans believe in some kind of god. Other research suggests that atheists are among the least trusted minority groups. Consider a recent paper in the American Sociological Review by Minnesota researchers Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann. They report that 39.6% of people polled say that atheist do “not at all agree with my vision of American Society.” This score is higher than any other group by a considerable margin. A 2007 shows that 53% of Americans would not vote for an atheist president, and another Gallup poll suggests that 84% of Americans think the nation is not ready for an atheist in the White House. The major source of concern inmorality. Many people worry that the faithless lack a moral rudder. Without God, morality loses its foundation.

Is this concern really justified?

Many philosophers will say it is not. It has been a common philosophical refrain since Plato wrote his dialogue the Euthyphro, which takes up the topic of piety, that morality cannot depend on divine decree. Suppose “good” just meant “commanded by God”; it would follow that “God is good” means only that “God does what he commands,” which is faint praise. Belief in a benevolent God is substantive only if one believes that God acts in accordance with some independent moral standard. On this view, even theists should accept that morality is independent of religion. But what standard could do the trick? There have been two thousand years of work by philosophers (mostly theists) trying to answer this question. The two most famous answers owe to John Stuart Mill and Immanual Kant. Very roughly, Mill says that happiness is intrinsically good, so we should try to maximize happiness, and Kant says that it is rational to recognize the common dignity of all people, and irrational to pursue actions that would undermine our own interests if others were to act similarly.

Research suggests that the independence of morality and religion is actually widely recognized outside of academic philosophy, even among staunch theists. For example, developmental psychologist Larry Nucci interviewed highly religious children from a wide range of backgrounds (including Catholics, Mennonites, and Orthodox Jews), and he found that they were overwhelmingly likely to judge that stealing would be wrong even if God were to say that stealing is permissible (see his Education in the Moral Domain). The aforementioned Pew study also reveals that fewer than a third of Americans cite religion as the major source of their moral values, and more than half claim that practical experience and common sense are the major source.

The independence of morality and religion can also be characterized in evolutionary terms. Under the influence of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, it was once believed that evolution leads to selfishness, but this supposition was rejected decades ago. Evolutionists now think we evolved to be altruistic, because helping others can increase fitness (helping kin spreads our genes and helping strangers promotes beneficial reciprocity and cooperation). These evolutionary models enjoy some psychological support. Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have shown that 14 month-old infants exhibit helpful behavior, even in the absence of reward. And even if altuism were not innate, it might be a precondition on stable society, so it might emerge inevitably through the course of “cultural evolution.” A moral code of some kind is likely to emerge regardless of religious outlook. Indeed, the moral values of major religions may be products of cultural evolution. Of course, cultural evolution does not guarantee that every society will be peaceful or egalitarian. War and hierarchy seem to be features of most social systems, whether religiously grounded or not.

So far, all this is good news with respect to the atheist threat. But there may be some truth to the anxieties mentioned at the outset. Atheists may be more prone to relativism and, perhaps, less prone to acting in accordance with widespread moral norms.

Let’s begin with relativism.

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